[Foucault-L] Duration, Dasein, Geneology, Archaeology.

From: michael bibby <shmickeyd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2010 22:17:18 -0700 (PDT)

Subject: [Foucault-L] Duration, Dasein, Geneology, Archaeology.

Certainly, Foucault was a close reader of Heidegger, who in turn was a close reader of Bergson. This is also true of Minkowski, and a host of others who seem to have rallied around Bergsons book which emerged as a balwark against the 'scientific barbarism', 'mechanistic rationality', 'technocrasy' of the age. Perhaps we could say that Foucault was reponding, in part at least, to the same crises which Bergson, Minkowski, Heidegger, Spengler, and many others were responding to, what we could provisionally call 'the crises of history', 'the crises of modernity'- the temporal crises which Elliot found at the crossroads of Little Gidding, the spiritual crises which Toynbee saw the west involving the rest of the world in as it spread its civilization throughout it.

Jungs description of the wandering jew who is unable to draw fresh life from the earth through his feet because they have been uprooted from their ancestral land could just as easily be applied to 'modern man', ahistorical and independent of geographical place, rendered mobile and shut up in hismself. Indeed, we see that it was, and least of all in Mein Kampf. We could say that this picture of the Jew is really a kind of charicture of modern man, more precisely of his 'priestly nature', to borrow Marx's expression.

The archaic revival in Germany, we read in The Function of the Orgasm, can be seen as a responce, although confused as to its object, to the 'mystical longing' opened up in the depths of mans alienation from the archaeology of the land, from the geneology of his people: just as the Jew had an ancient tradition which he carried around with him like an arab his tent through the desert, so too the German had the Indo-European- a retrospective hypothesis- geneology to restore him to the profundity from which he had become estranged through abstraction.

Tarkovsky takes up these themes in his allegory of Solviet Russia in the form of the oceanic space-station Solaris: this is the precise meaning of the pot-plant, which is the last thing we see before we leave the space station- the strange melieu in which it alone made the only sense- and return to earth.